Vincent Zhou, the new Junior World champion, was recently looking back on the period when men’s figure skating first took flight.

“There was a time when if you did one quad (jump),” Zhou said, “you were very good.”

That time was the early 2000s, more than a decade B.N.

Before Nathan.

Nathan Chen, the 17-year-old Salt Lake City born, Irvine-based skater, is among the gold medal favorites at his first World Figure Skating Championships this week in Helsinki.

“I have the stuff that I need, that anyone needs to win it,” Chen said. “It depends on how well I perform it.”

That stuff, the right stuff, is a resume of quad jumps the sport has never seen before.

Even before touching down in Finland, Chen had already transformed men’s skating, launching the sport into a new gravity defying, record-shattering era. Going into Worlds, Chen has landed 18 consecutive clean quadruple jumps in competition, including five in his U.S. Championships free skate in January and another five at Four Continents, where he knocked off an Olympic and Worlds caliber field.

“Five is the new normal,” Zhou said.

But for how long?

Chen hints that he has only began to push the edge of the envelope, a prospect that has sent his rivals scrambling, touching off a sort of skating arms race.

A measure of Chen’s influence on the direction of the sport is reflected in a recent announcement by Canada’s Patrick Chan, the three-time World champion and 2014 Olympic silver medalist, that Chen’s recent performances have led him to rethink his programs. Japan’s Yuzuru Hanyu, the reigning Olympic champion, landed four clean quads at Four Continents at the 2018 Olympic venue in Pyeongchang and still couldn’t touch Chen. The actions of Brian Orser, Hanyu’s coach, when Chen’s short program in South Korea appeared on the scoreboard suggests the teenager is already in his rivals’ heads.

“Brian was trying to block it from me,” Hanyu told reporters.

“It’s cool to be putting myself in a state where I can bring the best out of all the competitors,” Chen said. “We all want to win obviously, and I think being able to technically put myself out there so that other people want to keep pushing that will help push me in the future.”

Chen is perhaps best not compared to Hanyu, Chan or Spain’s Javier Fernandez, the reigning two-time World champion, but to two other transformative jumpers: Dick Fosbury and Bob Beamon.

Like the Mexico City Olympic icons, Chen has revolutionized his sport, in his case five jumps at a time, lifting American skating out of its post-Michelle Kwan slump and touching off a debate within skating about athleticism vs. artistry. Chen is the first skater to hit seven quads in a single competition and the first to land four different quads in a competition.

“It’s all about the jumps,” Zhou said.

Chen also finds himself on an orbit that could transcend the sport, making him a household name between now and the 2018 Olympic Games next February. He was recently named by Time magazine as one of the “new world leaders.”

Chen first took the ice in pursuit of more earthly aspirations.

“I wanted to be a goalie,” he said. “I wanted to play hockey.”

On the rinks that sprouted up around Salt Lake City for the 2002 Olympics, Chen soon set his sights on the stars.

“Even when I was younger I never really saw an end to where we could take jumps,” he said. “But I never really thought that I would be doing the stuff that I’m doing.”

His jumping took off when he moved from Utah to Southern California to train under Rafael Arutyunyan and alongside three-time U.S. champion Ashley Wagner in Lakewood. He landed his first quad jump, a quad toe at 15, and added a second quad a short time later.

“Then I started thinking maybe I can do more,” he said.

He was third at the 2016 U.S. Championships but suffered an avulsion injury in his left hip in an exhibition performance a few hours later. The injury required surgery that left Chen in a cast for several weeks.

Chen announced his return with a victory at the CS Finlandia Trophy, an ISU Grand Prix event last fall. He was simply untouchable at the U.S. Championships in January, his overall score of 318.47 shattering the competition’s previous men’s record score by 43 points and finishing 55 points ahead of second place, the largest margin of victory at the U.S. Championships by any skater, male or female.

Against a Four Continents field that included all the Worlds medal contenders except Fernandez, Chen was nearly as impressive. He landed the two toughest quads, a lutz and flip, en route to the short program score of 103.12 that Orser was afraid to let Hanyu see. Chen went five for five in the free skate for a 204.34 mark, 307.46 total score, the highest score in the world this season in an international competition.

“Five that’s kind of my standard right now,” Chen said pausing for a moment.

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